The New Egalitarianism

The New Egalitarians aim to explain how various social practices help maintain the status and well-being of a society’s dominant groups in ways that perpetuate inequalities related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identifying traits of traditionally disadvantaged groups. But the New Egalitarians stack the deck in appointing themselves the only possible “experts” for deciding how to diagnose society’s ills, evading critical scrutiny, and denying the standing of their critics. Putting the New Egalitarianism into practice would require that matters of right and wrong be decided by a set of moral experts—not by individual conscience or widely understood social rules—and would be poorly suited for imperfect beings like us. Award-winning essay.